“People talk a lot of crap about me. She’s probably just a drug addict with tattoos, into devil worship, blah, blah, blah.”

Adult performer and MMA fighter Orion Starr on how sex and violence interplay in her life

“I was pretty much alone most of my childhood, always sitting at lunch alone, up until I got into high school…” – Orion Starr

Hello all. I’ve been travelling from the UK to Canary Islands, back to the UK and then home to Australia these past two weeks, so my latest offering is an old interview with MMA fighter Rebecca Brygmann who, at the time of our conversation in 2020, also performed in porn as Orion Starr. I probably don’t need to warn you… it’s very explicit and not for everyone.

It seems fitting, when I finally get Orion Starr on the other end of the phone, that we both have croaky voices. Mine’s because it’s five in the morning in Melbourne. Hers is an authentic New Yorker rasp. But it’s also a temporary effect of the sexual activity she’s most known for as an adult performer.

Last week she posted a nude on Twitter, with the caption ‘This is what lethal looks like.’ In it, she’s holding the camera phone up to the bathroom mirror. Her bleached hair is parted in the middle, her body angled away so that her vulva is only just visible. The tip of her tongue rests to one side of her mouth, showing her pierced bottom lip. Her nipples are pierced, too, with steel bars, and either side of her pierced belly button there are tattooed stars. She has a ram’s skull tattoo on her chest, and the words across her ribcage run in reverse in the mirror: SEX AND VIOLENCE.

The main reason I tracked down Orion is that she tests her limits both by dishing it out and by taking it. To her, they are two sides of the same coin. When she’s not being ‘deconstructed by cock’ (as another porn star has memorably put it), she’s a professional cage fighter under her real name, Rebecca Bryggman, and fights in leading MMA promotions such as Bellator. Orion is not the first adult performer to be attracted to martial arts – Blaten Lee, Priya Rai, Brittney Skye, Aby Rulloda and Adrianna Luna all dabbled in fighting – but she’s by far the most successful.

As an adult performer, Orion has worked for the production company Facial Abuse, one of a cluster of production companies that makes a mockery of consent. It’s common for reputable BDSM production companies to interview a submissive performer afterwards, partly to demonstrate that she’s okay, and partly for her to demystify her lifestyle-love of rough sex and bondage for the vanilla viewer. But in the exit interviews from the more nefarious production companies, the female performer is alarmingly void of expression. She’ll answer flatly that yes, she is okay. Yes, she enjoyed that. Yes, she’ll say hi to her dad.

But back to Orion.

‘It was the most exciting thing,’ she says. ‘It’s not your regular hardcore porn scene, it’s real extreme degradation. That’s just the fetish people have, and in order to make a great scene you have to enjoy what you do. I like a lot of crazy, taboo stuff; I’m just an extremist, I guess. I like to do things that people wouldn’t normally do and I like to make a statement doing that. I also like proving people wrong.’

Orion has filmed with Facial Abuse more than any other company because it’s based in New Jersey, whereas most shoots would require her to fly out to LA. ‘It’s this old building with separate studios and offices in it. It’s pretty suburban,’ she says, when pressed for details. ‘I bring a few outfits, then I do my makeup and get ready in the dressing-room.’

Orion would typically be on set for four hours for such a film, basically two scenes: the disparaging introductory interview and then the sex. She insists that during the breaks the tag-team of men – when the camera is rolling, who snarl at her to open her legs wider like the stripper she is – snap back to being the sweetest guys. The problem, she thinks, is a lot of girls just accept a booking from their manager without weighing up the consequences.

‘For me it’s not just about the money – I enjoy it,’ she says. ‘I’m a sexual deviant. When I was eighteen I started going to fetish parties and doing dominatrix work. I wanted to get more involved with being an all-round dominatrix and a sub, because I like to try both ends of the spectrum. I like to be dominant sometimes and sometimes I like to be submissive. I have a very high pain tolerance.’

Her attitude towards punishment reminds me curiously of the book Why We Fight (2019), in which journalist Josh Rosenblatt writes of his forays into MMA training as a 40-year-old. In particular, he marvels at how quickly he becomes beholden to bravado, dining out on his injuries:

How right it felt to give in to my bloodiest instincts after all those cerebral, dormant, placid years, to feel my body fighting for its own preservation, to abandon my veneer of civilisation and decency and experience the life-affirming thrill of putting my life, and the lives of others, at risk. I soon found myself looking forward to getting punched in the head and choked into submission, and I started to recognise and long for the odd mixture of horror and envy that seemed to appear in people’s eyes whenever I explained at a dinner party or the bar why I was limping or how I got this black eye or that broken finger.

As a fighter, Orion is tough, sharp and focused, yet something of a scrappy underdog. She’s like the Tonya Harding of MMA, likely to never be accepted entirely because of her porn career. And yet, that career probably gave her the resilience for cage fighting. After one high-profile loss, London’s The Sun described her as ‘humiliated’ and Brisbane’s The Courier Mail as ‘brutalised’, but then, her adult movies on sites such as Pornhub are listed with descriptors such as ‘Orion Starr dumps her guts.’

Orion is unfazed. ‘People talk a lot of crap about me,’ she says. ‘She’s probably just a drug addict with tattoos, into devil worship, blah, blah, blah. But I really don’t care what they say. They’re just hating because I do what they can’t, you know what I mean? They don’t have the guts to do it. So. It is what it is.’

Orion was always a thrill-seeker. As a kid, she loved roller-coasters and amusement parks, watched horror movies avidly and dressed up as Freddy Krueger for Halloween. In her spare time now she cosplays as a Viking, or the DC Comics villain Harley Quinn. As a fighter, she’s adopted the bad-guy nickname ‘Rebecca Carnage Rampage’. She had twenty-five kickboxing fights before making the move into MMA. ‘I’ve had just as many fights as I have years of life,’ she says. ‘It feels like I was kicking and screaming and punching things when I came out of the womb. I guess I was born to be a fighter. I’ve always had a killer instinct for it.’

On her Instagram account, Orion hangs shit on future opponents, or mocks those who have dropped out or who lost. ‘Love this shot. You see her face getting wrecked…’ ‘Getting ready to fuck her world up’. Someone schools her: ‘Great match, but respect your opponent if you want to become a good fighter.’ Orion retorts: ‘Fuck that bitch. Who says I’m nice?’

When she wins, her gloating is glorious. Perhaps it’s her geeky love of cosplay coming out, but she’s fully embraced the theatre of MMA. ‘I literally jumped up and down with my first win, screaming my head off,’ she says happily. ‘A lot of people secretly just want to see you fail, so it felt like, Oh my god, I just literally made everybody fucking mad. I was jumping up and down, screaming like an orc. It was so great. The girl [her opponent] had made a slick remark to my coach, then I noticed when I passed by her dressing-room later she was crying in the corner.’ She laughs. ‘So I made her cry.’ She laughs again.

Growing up, says Orion – ‘if you want to get into that’ – her mother would ‘get wordy’ with her. ‘And I was bullied a lot. I was pretty much alone most of my childhood, always sitting at lunch alone, up until I got into high school.’ She brightens. ‘Then all that stopped because I developed and everyone stopped picking on me, like, “Oh my god, she’s attractive.” And I was like, “PAH! Now you want me, but before you didn’t! Now, yeah, you want me. Do you remember all those times you used to call me this, this and that and laugh at me in the lunchroom? Yeah, I remember that.”

Orion’s outburst reminds me of a passage in Jasmin St Claire’s autobiography, in which she describes getting into porn to take revenge on abusive exes and to anger her mother. Tera Patrick, a former teen model from San Francisco, had fallen out with her disapproving mum; Australian performer Monica Mayhem wanted it to stick it to her heavy-drinking mother and those who’d bullied her; Penny Flame, who began her career after answering an ad in the San Diego State University newspaper, wrote about a mother who was always drunk; and Ashley Blue grew up in Californian home with parents who were addicted to drugs.

‘That’s probably what really drove me, aside from I’ve been in really abusive relationships, physically and mentally,’ Orion says. ‘It just builds up over time, like, “I’m so sick of this. I just want to PUNCH somebody.”’

A week after I talk to Orion, I proudly post a video to Instagram in which I’m whaling my way through some kickboxing pad work. I receive a private message from her.

Have u ever even had one fight?

Is Orion dissing me? Deflated, I point out that I have not – yet – but that this is my aim.

Oh i have 25 [kickboxing] fights plus 2 MMA fights

I write back that I know this, as I interviewed her the week before and we talked about it.

Oh i didn’t realise ur the same girl, she types back. My bad.

Lmaoooo.

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This extract is taken from my book Everything Harder Than Everyone Else, about people who push their bodies to extremes.